After Mademoiselle’s disgrace (exiled because of the Fronde), he became composer to the royal chamber (1653), and eventually surintendant of the king’s chamber music (1661). By 1672, he controlled music theatre throughout France.

In 1671, the Abbé Pierre Perrin and composer Robert Cambert were granted royal licence to found the Académie d’Opéras en Musique et verbe français, and staged the first French opera, Pomone. When their enterprise failed, Lully bought the royal licence.

The stories focused on a romantic quadrangle or parallelogram: it set a couple of lovers (heroes or royal) against their rivals (kings, gods, sorceresses), with a parallel intrigue involving their attendants.

There was plenty of spectacle, with lavish sets, gods descending in machines, battles, miraculous transformations (into trees, rivers, and birds), monsters, and storms at sea.

Saint-Evremond called them “magnificent follies, full of music, machines, and decorations”; while La Bruyère declared that “Opera must have machines, and the point of the spectacle is to keep wits, eyes, and ears in an equal enchantment”.

There was a lot of lively dancing (Louis XIV believed dance symbolised the king’s agility and power), magnificent choruses – and plenty of recitative.

France had a strong theatrical tradition; the 17th century was the age of Racine and Corneille. Drama, therefore, came first; music’s purpose was to underline, to express the text, rather than to distract from it. Following Monteverdi’s Florentine tradition, Lully sacrifices music to the clarity of declamation. (No virtuoso arias for castrati.)

Much of Lully’s trágedies lyriques consists of recitative accompanied by strings (guitars). The recitative provides clear explanations to the intelligent French listener. It blooms here and there, Laurencie argues, in lyrical episodes, in measured arias distributed a little like the tirades of classical tragedy, and supported by short verses grouped in quatrains or strophes.

Much of the recitative is attractive, and there are exquisite little duets or trios, often only lasting a few bars.

Lully’s operas vanished from the stage with the passing of the tragédie lyrique. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants’ 1987 production of Atyswas the first Lully opera performed in two centuries, and has rekindled interest in a composer who was a respected name rather than a living presence.

The emphasis on recitative can, however, be an acquired taste. “Lully’s recitative is bloodless, its vigour carefully paced, its passion channelled, its nobility stereotyped and laboured,” Joseph Kerman complained. “Its greatest pride was justness of declamation, a characteristically French virtue which does not mark its dryness of expression“.

Similarly, Donald Jay Grout thought “Anyone who plays through the whole score of a Lully opera is likely to emerge from that experience (if he survives it at all) with a confused impression of page upon page of music void of imagination, pale in colour, thin in harmony, monotonous in invention, stereotyped in rhythm, limited in melody, barren of contrapuntal resource and so cut into little sections by perpetually recurring cadences that all sense of movement seems lost in a desert of cliches, relieved all too rarely by oases of real beauty.”

Lully has many admirers, however, particularly in France, where he is admired for his sensitivity to drama and expression. It took me, I confess, a while to warm to Lully’s operas; I found the later Rameau more immediately attractive. Only by listening to Lully in context – coming off the back of Monteverdi’s Ulisse and Poppea – did I appreciate him.

Cadmus et Hermione was Lully’s first experiment in the tragédie lyrique genre. The composer’s first period, Labardie argues, gropes and wavers on the borders of comédie-ballet and opera; its aesthetics are not yet settled.

Cadmus, prince of Tyre, rescues Hermione from the giant Draco. With the help of the goddess Pallas, he slays a dragon (which eats a couple of Africans), and sows its teeth to create the Spartoi. There are dancing statues, and an impressive ceremony honouring Mars. The opera opens with a prologue praising Louis XIV as Sol Invictus, and ends with a banquet of Olympian gods.

It’s historically important, but a nullity as an opera. A mythological spectacle designed to entertain and flatter Louis XIV, with very little characterisation, action, or narrative sense – but a lot of ballet. It’s only two hours long, but feels longer than some twice its length. Most of the music is dull, bar the Africans’ trio, the chorus of the sacrifice to Mars, and the finale.

The work, Laurencie argues, betrays the composer’s inexperience. For the first time, he writes, Lully tried to connect scenes and arias via sung declamation, but, too concerned with closely following the words, he only half succeeded. Result: monotony.

The opera is also an unsuccessful mixture of comédie-ballet and pastorale wih tragedy, Labardie maintains. With its pastoral prologue full of shepherds and Pan, heroic drama, and farcically comic servants, the opera suffers a great uncertainty of style.

Even Théodore de Lajarte, editor of a piano-vocal score for Breitkopf & Härtel, is mutedly enthusiastic.

“The persistence of the same tonalities and the same stylistic procedures, the absence of rhythm, lead to a monotony of accent. – But, to make one forget this undeniable monotony, one will find charming episodes that rest the ear from those beautiful recitatives, perhaps a little too long; and those recitatives themselves are so well recited, so true of accent, so conformable to poetics, that they will remain forever models of diction and excellent subjects of study.”

SYNOPSIS

PROLOGUE

The prologue, like the flowers that bloom in the spring, has nothing to do with the case, trala. The Opéra-Comique calls it an “Allegory in praise of the King as Sol Invictus”. Nature spirits and worshippers of Pan wait for the rising of the Sun (pronounced “Louis”). Envy appears, plunges the stage into darkness, and summons a terrible Python from a cave, and foul winds from below. The Sun appears, and banishes the monsters. Hurrah!

ACT I

The story proper begins. The Tyrian prince Cadmus is looking for his sister Europa (whom, you will remember, was kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a white bull). Cadmus loves Hermione, daughter of Mars and Venus, but her father and Juno want her to marry the giant Draco. Pallas promises to help the prince.

ACT II

Cadmus rescues Hermione, while his companion Arbas distracts the women of her retinue – flirting with Charite, and avoiding the Nurse. Cadmus bids farewell to Hermione; he must go slay a dragon. Cupid brings statues to life to amuse the Princess (cue ballet), and promises to protect her.

ACT III

Arbas and two Africans lurk outside the dragon’s cave, afraid to face the beast. The monster eats two of the Africans – but Cadmus kills it. Arbas comes out of hiding, stabs the beast, and pretends to have killed it – but is terrified by its death throes. Cadmus organises a ceremony to Mars to appease the god, but the deity destroys the altars.

Highlight: The march and chorus of the Sacrificateurs

ACT IV

The famous incident of the dragon’s teeth. Each one that Cadmus sows turns into an armed man (the Spartoi). They fight the prince, but Cupid helps him defeat them with a magic grenade. The survivors come over to Cadmus’s side. The giant Draco and his cronies attack Cadmus, but Pallas turns them into stone with the Gorgon’s head. Cadmus finds his Hermione – but Juno kidnaps her in her chariot.

ACT V

Cadmus is distraught by Hermione’s loss…

but Pallas tells him that Jupiter and Juno have ended their quarrel, and the gods will restore Hermione. All the Olympian gods come down to celebrate the wedding at a magnificent feast.

On one level, it’s a fascinating recreation of the 1673 staging, using technology of the time: painted backcloths, moving scenery, gods coming down from chariots, serpents coming out of the floor…

The pronunciation, too, is a recreation; it’s français classique. The final consonants (“s”, “x”, and “t”s) are pronounced, and the vowels are different (“oy” for “oi”).

I really wish more opera productions would follow this model. Imagine being able to see a Meyerbeer (insert favourite composer of your choice) the way an 1830s audience would have done! Too often, though, it’s “witty”, “clever” deconstructions, where Greek gods are put in cargo pants to be relevant. This is more HIP than hip.

It’s also one of the campest things I’ve ever seen: two hours of men in wigs, eyeshadow, and lipstick prancing about, often with half an ostrich stuck on their heads. That’s not to mention l’Envie (an angry man in a dress, à la Roger De Bris); the Tyrian princes, whose long ringlets and makeup make them look like members of an early ’80s New Romantic band; or the Nurse, a middle-aged woman played by a man in drag, like one of the Pythons’ pepperpots, pursuing the bass.